Erin McGuire spent years cultivating fruits and vegetables such as onions, peppers and tomatoes as a scientist and later director of a laboratory at the University of California-Davis. She collaborated with hundreds of people to grow drought -resistant varieties, develop new ways to cool fresh production, and find ways to make more money for small farmers at home and abroad.
Then the funding stopped. Its laboratory and expansion many of its overseas partners have been financially supported by the United States Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has dismantled over the last few weeks. Just before the time came to collect data that were two years in the creation, her team received a stop work order. She had to cut her entire team. Soon she was fired.
“It’s really just devastating,” she said. “I don’t know how you come back from that.”
The United States needs more publicly funded agricultural research and development to compensate for the effects of climate change, according to a document in the National Academy of Sciences this month. But instead, the US is investing less. Data from the United States Ministry of Agriculture show that since 2019, the United States has spent about a third less for agricultural research than its peak in 2002, a difference of about $ 2 billion. Recent pauses and freezing for funding for climate change and international development research only add to the decline. This is a serious problem for farmers who depend on new innovations to keep their business in sailing, the next generation of scientists and ultimately for consumers who buy food.
If scientists have reliable support, they can continue to improve crop varieties in order to withstand better on dangerous weather conditions such as sushi or floods, find new applications for existing crops, understand how to protect workers, develop new technology to help you plant and collect more ecculation. They can also study the potential role of agriculture in the fight against climate change.
“This is a terrible news for the US agricultural sector,” says Cornel Ariel Ortiz-Boba, a leading author of the document.
Trump administration accelerates funding cuts
As the Trump administration pauses and stones for research programs funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, USDA and other agencies, Ortiz-Bobea and other experts, have seen field tests, doctoral positions have eliminated the proceedings and the instruments of the reality. him.
EPA declined to comment and the USDA and USAID did not respond to the Associated Press requests.
Ortiz-Bobea and its team quantitatively determined the overall productivity of agriculture in the United States, calculated how much it would be delayed by climate change in the coming years and calculated how much money would be invested in research and development to counteract this delay.
Think of this like riding a motor in the wind, said Ortiz-Bobaa. To maintain the same speed, you must pedal more strongly; In this case, the R&D may be this additional impetus.
Some countries are directing this direction. China has spent almost twice as much as the United States on agricultural research and has increased its investment in research to five times since 2000, writes Omar Gaumai, a scientist from the Food and Environment Team in the Union of Interested Scientists in an email.
Cost interruptions have also closed agricultural research in almost all Feed the Future innovation laboratories, of which McGuire’s is one. These 17 laboratories at 13 universities focus on food security, technical agriculture research, policy and various aspects of climate change. The obligations to stop these laboratories not only disappointed the researchers, but made much of their work useless.
“There are many, many millions of dollars expenses that will now not generate anything because the work could not be completed,” says David Zwirley, a professor who has run another of these programs, since 2019 at the Laboratory for Innovation for Food and Influence Research at the Michigan State University.
Finding new funding for agricultural research
Some researchers hope that other sources of funding can fill the gaps: “It is there that the private sector can really be activated,” says Szati Hagde, a scientist in the Food, Earth and Water Program at the World Resources Institute.
From a agricultural point of view, climate change is “really scary”, with larger and larger regions, exposed to temperatures above the health conditions of cultivation of many crops, said Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, multinational biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, which invests nearly 3 billion dollars. But private companies have their own R&D investment restrictions and he said that Bayer could not invest as much as he would like in this area.
“I don’t think the private industry can repeat,” how federal funding usually maintains an early stage, speculative science, “he said,” because the economy doesn’t really work. ” He added that the industry tends to be more appropriate to support ideas that have already been validated.
Gaumai of the Union of Interested Scientists also expressed fears that financing private research is not as traceable and transparent as public funding. Others said that even significant investments from companies do not give any money anywhere to match state funding.
Researchers, farmers and users feel the fall out
Full impact may not be obvious for many years and damage will not be easily repaired. Experts believe this will be a blow to other countries where climate change is already reducing yields, stimulating hunger and conflict.
“I really worry that if we don’t really look at the global food situation, we will have a disaster,” says David Zilberman, a professor at UC Berkeley, who won the Wolf Award in 2019 for his work on agriculture.
But even in the country, experts say that one thing is almost certain: it will mean even higher prices in the grocery store now and in the future.
“More people on Earth, you need more productivity to prevent crazy food prices,” says Tom Hell, a professor of agricultural economy at the University of Purdu. Even if nothing changes immediately, he believes that “10 years now, in 20 years, our growth growth will certainly be stunned” by reducing the productivity of agriculture.
Many scientists have said that the wound is not just professional, but personal.
“People are very demoralized,” especially the younger researchers who have no mandate and want to work on international food research, Zilberman said.
Now these dreams are detained for many. In the carefully maintained research plots, weeds begin to grow.
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